Summary
Although in the above résumé of the phenomena of memory I have for the most part made use of personal observations, these, so far as the phenomena themselves are concerned, are in accord with those of other observers. It would have been easy to have drawn for corroboration upon the writings of Gurney, Janet, Charcot, Breuer, Freud, Sidis, Coriat, and others.
A survey of all the facts which I have outlined in this lecture forces us to ask ourselves the question: To what extent are life’s experiences conserved? Indeed it was to meet this question that I have reviewed so large a variety of forgotten experiences which experiment or observation in individual cases has shown to be conserved. If my aim had been to show simply that an experience, which has been lost beyond all possible voluntary recall, may still be within the power of reproduction when special devices adapted to the purpose are employed, it would not have been necessary to cover such a wide field of inquiry. To meet the wider question it was necessary to go farther afield and examine a large variety of experiences occurring in multiform conditions of mental life.
After doing this the important principle is forced upon us in strong relief that it matters not in what period of life, or in what state, experiences have occurred, or how long a time has intervened since their occurrence; they may still be conserved. They become dormant, but under favorable conditions they may be awakened and may enter conscious life. We have seen, even by the few examples I have given, that childhood experiences that are supposed to have long been buried in oblivion may be conserved. We have seen that the mental life of artificial and pathological states is subject to the same principle; that the experiences of hypnosis, trance states, deliria, intoxication, dissociated personality—though there may be absolute amnesia in the normal waking state for them—may still be capable of reproduction as memory. Yet of the vast number of mental experiences which we have during the course of our lives we can voluntarily recall but a fractional part. What proportion of the others is conserved is difficult, if not impossible, to determine. The difficulty is largely a practical one due to the inadequacy of our technical methods of investigation. In the first place, our technic is only applicable to a limited number of persons. In the second place, it is obvious that when an episode—occurring in the course of everyday life—is forgotten, but is recovered under one or another of the conditions I have described, it is only in a minority of instances that circumstances will permit confirmation of this evidence by collateral and independent testimony. Still, if we take the evidence as a whole its cumulative force is such as to compel the conviction that a vast number of experiences, more than we can possibly voluntarily recall, are conserved, and that it is impossible to affirm that any given experience may not persist in a dormant state. It is impossible to say what experiences of our daily life have failed to be conserved and what are awaiting only a favorable condition of reproduction to be stimulated into activity as memory. Even if they cannot be reproduced by voluntary effort, or by some one particular device, they may be by another and, if all devices fail, they may be recovered in pathological conditions like delirium, trance, spontaneous hallucinations, etc., or in normal dissociated states like dreams. The inability to recall an experience is no evidence whatever that it is not conserved. Indeed, even when the special methods and moments fail it is still not always possible to say that it is not conserved.
It would be a gross exaggeration to say, on the basis of the evidence at our disposal, that all life’s experiences persist as potential memories, or even that this is true of the greater number. It is, however, undoubtedly true that of the great mass of experiences which have passed out of all voluntary recollection, an almost incredible, even if relatively small, number still lie dormant, and, under favoring conditions, many can be brought within the field of conscious memory. The significance of this fact will become apparent to us later after we have studied the nature of conservation. Still more significant, particularly for abnormal psychology, is the fact we have brought out by our technical methods of investigation; namely, that almost any conserved experience under certain conditions can function as a subconscious memory and become translated into, i.e., produce sensory and motor automatic phenomena, such as hallucinations, writing, speech, etc. It will not be surprising if we shall find that various other disturbances of mind and body are produced by such subconscious processes.
Two striking facts brought out by some of these investigations are the minuteness of the details with which forgotten experiences may be conserved and the long periods of time during which conservation may persist. Thus, as we have seen, experiences dating back to early childhood may be shown to be preserved in extremely minute detail though the individual has long forgotten them. Furthermore, it has been shown that even remembered experiences may be conserved in far more elaborate detail than would appear from so much of the experience as can be voluntarily recalled. Probably our voluntary memory is not absolutely perfect for any experience in all its details but the details that are conserved often far exceed those that can be recalled.
In the survey of life’s experiences which we have studied we have, for the most part, considered those which have had objective relation and have been subject to confirmation by collateral testimony. But we should not overlook the fact that among mental experiences are those of the inner as well as outer life. To the former belong the hopes and aspirations, the regrets, the fears, the doubts, the self-communings and wrestlings with self, the wishes, the loves, the hates, all that we are not willing to give out to the world, and all that we would forget and would strive not to admit to ourselves. All this inner life belongs to our experience and is subject to the same law of conservation.
Finally, it should be said that much of what is not ordinarily regarded as memory is made up of conserved experiences. A large part of every mental content is memory the source of which is forgotten. Just as our vocabulary is memory, though we do not remember how and where it was acquired, so our judgments, beliefs, and opinions are in large part made up of past experiences which are forgotten but which have left their traces as integral parts of concepts ingrained in our personalities.
[27]. For a full account of this experiment, see An Experimental Study of Visions, Brain, Winter Number, 1898; The Dissociation, pp. 81, 82.
[28]. The Dissociation, p. 77.
[29]. For numerous observations of this kind, see Pierre Janet: The Mental States of Hystericals.
[30]. The Mechanism and Interpretation of Dreams, loc. cit.
[31]. Loc. cit. See p. 51.
[32]. See Lecture VI, p. 185.
[33]. Gurney was among the first to demonstrate the induction of several states in the same subject. He was able to obtain three different hypnotic states (Proceedings S. P. R., Vol. IV, p. 515), and Mrs. Sidgwick and Miss Johnson eight in one individual, each with amnesia for the other. Janet, of course, demonstrated the same phenomena. In the cases of Miss B. and B. C. A. I obtained a large number of such states.
[34]. Morton Prince: The Dissociation, p. 55; also An Experimental Study of Visions, Brain, Winter Number, 1898.
[35]. Some of the Revelations of Hypnotism, Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, May 22, 1890.
[36]. Studien über Hysterie.
[37]. Of course I am not discussing here the genetic mechanism of the amnesia, being concerned only with the principle of conservation.
[38]. The Dissociation, pp. 284-5, 456-9.
[39]. Boris Sidis: The Psychology of Suggestion, p. 224; see also Multiple Personality, p. 143.
[40]. The Journal of Abnormal Psychology, Vol. II, p. 93.
[41]. The Dissociation, pp. 220, 221, 255, 531, 532.
[42]. The Dissociation, p. 83.
[43]. The Journal of Abnormal Psychology, Vol. I, No. 3.
[44]. American Journal of Insanity, July, 1910.
LECTURE IV
CONSERVATION A RESIDUUM OF EXPERIENCES
A consideration of all the facts of observation and experiment of the kind which I have recited in the last two lectures—and I might have multiplied them many times—forces us to the conclusion that whether or not we can recall any given experience it may be still conserved. Bear in mind that I have used conservation, thus far, only in the sense that under favoring changes in the moment’s consciousness, or by special methods of stimulation, a past experience may reproduce itself, or may be made to reproduce itself, in one form or another of memory.
It may be, for example, that you have to-day only a vague and general recollection of the last lecture and if you should endeavor to write an account of it from memory the result would be but a fragmentary report. And yet it is quite possible that, if one or another of the various technical methods I have described could be applied to some one of you, we should be able to recover quite exact memories, of certain portions at least, of the lecture—perhaps verbatim transcripts of certain portions, and large numbers of facts which are quite beyond your present recollection.
Our study of those phenomena of memory which I cited in the last lecture was carried only so far as to allow us to draw the conclusions as to conservation which I have just stated. And, in drawing these conclusions, let me repeat—we have provisionally limited the meaning of the term conservation simply to the potential ability to reproduce experiences, with or without recollection, either in their original form, or translated into a graphic, visual, or auditory expression of them. We have not attempted from these phenomena to draw conclusions as to the nature of conservation, or as to whether it is anything apart from reproduction under favorable conditions. If we do not look below the surface of the phenomena it might be held that memory is only a recurrent phase of consciousness, and that the term conservation is only a figure of speech to express the ability to determine that recurrence in our self-consciousness.
Let us examine now a little more closely some of the phenomena we have already examined but inadequately.
Residual processes underlying automatic motor phenomena: writing, speech, gestures, etc.—We will take writing as a type and the following as an example: In a state of hypnosis a subject learns a verse by heart. It is then suggested that this verse shall be written automatically after he has been awakened. (By arranging the conditions of the experiment in this way we make certain that the script afterwards written shall express a memory and not a fabrication.) After the subject returns to the normal waking state he has complete amnesia for the whole hypnotic state and therefore for the verse. Now, if the experiment is successful, his hand writes the given verse without the subject being aware of what his hand is writing, and it may be without being aware that his hand is writing anything at all. The whole thing has been done without participation of his consciousness and without his knowing that any such phenomenon was to occur. (Of course any of his conscious experiences while in the hypnotic state might have been used as a test, these being known to the experimenter as well.) Now the things to be noted are:
1, that the script expresses a memory; that is, reproduces previous conserved conscious ideas—the verse. It expresses memory just exactly as it would express it if it had been consciously and voluntarily written.
2, that these ideas while in a state of conservation and without entering consciousness—i.e., becoming conscious memory—express themselves in written language.
3, that this occurs while the subject has complete amnesia for the conserved ideas and therefore he could not possibly reproduce them as conscious memory.
4, that that which effects the writing is not a recurring phase of the self-consciousness which is concerned at the moment with totally different ideas.
5, that the “state of conservation” is, at least during the writing, a specific state existing and functioning independently and outside of the personal self-consciousness.
6, that in functioning it induces specific processes which make use of the same organized physiological mechanisms which ordinarily are made use of by conscious memory to express itself in writing and that these processes are not in, but independent of, consciousness.
We are forced to conclude therefore that a conscious experience—in this case the ideas of the verse—is conserved through the medium of some kind of residuum of itself capable of specific functioning and inducing processes which reproduce in the form of written symbols the ideas of the original experience.
We need not consider for the present the nature of the residuum, and its process, whether it is the ideas themselves or something else.
Residual processes underlying hallucinations.—We will take the observation of B. C. A. looking into a crystal and reading some printed words—a cablegram—which she had previously unconsciously overheard.[[45]] The words were, let us say, “Best Wishes and a Happy New Year.” This visual picture was not a literal reproduction of the original experience, which was a subconscious auditory experience of the same words, of which she was not aware; but plainly, nevertheless, the visual picture must have been determined somehow by the auditory experience. Equally plainly the visual image was not a recurrent phase of the consciousness, for the words of the message had not been previously seen. What occurred was this: the antecedent auditory perception manifested itself in consciousness after an interval of time as a visual hallucination of the words. There was a reproduction of the original experience but not in its original form. It had undergone a secondary alteration by which the visual perception replaced the auditory perception. As a memory it was a conversion or translation of an auditory experience into terms of another sense. Now the conversion must have been effected by some mechanism outside of consciousness; that is to say, it was not an ordinary visualization, i.e., intensely vivid secondary images pertaining to a conscious memory, as when one thinks of the morning’s breakfast table and visualizes it; for there was no conscious memory of the words, or knowledge that there ever had been such an experience. The visualization therefore must have been induced by something not in the content of consciousness,—something we have called a secondary process, of which the individual is unaware.
We can conceive of the phenomenon originating in either one of two possible modes. Either the hallucination was a newly fabricated conscious experience; or it was a reproduction of secondary visual images originally belonging to the auditory perception at the time of its occurrence and now thrust into consciousness in an intensely vivid form. In either case, for this to have taken place something must have been left by the original experience and conserved apart from and independent of the content of the personal consciousness at any and all moments—something capable of functioning after an interval of time as a secondary process outside of the personal consciousness. The only intelligible explanation of the phenomenon is that the original auditory impression persisted, somehow and somewhere, in a form capable of conservation as a specific and independent residuum during all subsequent changes in the content of consciousness. This residuum either fabricated the hallucination or thrust its secondary images into consciousness to become the hallucination.
The phenomenon by itself does not permit a conclusion as to the nature of the residuum, whether it is psychological or neural; i.e., whether an auditory perception, as perception, still persists subconsciously outside the focus of awareness of consciousness, or whether it has left an alteration of some kind in the neurons. Whatever the inner nature of the conserved experience it obviously must have a very specific and independent existence, somehow and somewhere, outside of the awareness of consciousness, and one capable of secondary functioning in a way that can reproduce the original experience in terms of another sense. In other words, conservation must be in the form of some kind of residuum, psychological or neural. It must be, therefore, something very different from reproduction or a recurrent phase of consciousness. Further, it must form a stage in the process of memory of which reproduction is the final result.
This observation of course does not stand alone. I have cited a number of observations and might cite many more in which the same phenomenon of transformation or conversion of sensory images of one sense into images of another sense was prominent. Indeed a study of hallucinations, artificial or spontaneous, which are representations of former experiences and where the determining factors can be ascertained, will show that in most, if not all, of them this same mechanism of conversion is at work. Take, for instance, the experiment cited in our last lecture, the one in which Miss B. was directed to look into a crystal for the purpose of discovering the whereabouts of some money she had lost without being aware of the fact. In the crystal she sees a vision of herself walking along a particular street in Boston absorbed in thought. She sees herself in a moment of absent-mindedness take some banknotes out of her pocket, tear them up, and throw them into the street.
Now this artificial hallucination was, as we have seen, a picture of an actual occurrence for which there was amnesia. It must, therefore, have been determined by that experience. The psychological phenomena manifested, however, were really much more complicated than would appear at first sight. An analysis of this vision, which unfolded itself like a cinematograph picture, would show that it was a composite visual representation of several different kinds of experiences—of past perceptions of her body and face, of her conscious knowledge of her relation to the environment (in the street), of muscular movements, and of her knowledge derived from subconscious tactile impressions of the act. Of these last she was not aware at the time of their occurrence. Much of this knowledge must have persisted as a residuum of the original experience and functioned subconsciously. Thereby, perhaps, the original secondary visual images were reproduced and emerged into consciousness as the hallucination or pictorial memory.
Similar phenomena indicative of conservation being effected by means of a residuum of the original experience may be produced experimentally in various ways. For instance, in certain hysterics with anesthesia if you prick a number of times a part of the body—say the hand—in which all tactile sensation has been lost, and later direct the subject to look into a crystal, he will see a number, perhaps written on a hand. This number, let us say five, will correctly designate the number of times the hand was pricked. Now, because of the loss of sensibility, the subject was unaware of the pin-pricks. Nevertheless, of course, they were recorded subconsciously, coconsciously)[coconsciously)]. Their subsequent transformation into a visual hallucination not only shows that they were conserved, but that they left something which was capable of taking part, outside of consciousness, in a secondary process which gave rise to the hallucination.
An examination of all crystal visions, so far as they are translated memories of actual experiences, will show this same evidence for a conserved residuum.
That conservation is not merely a figure of speech to express the ability to determine the recurrence of a previous experience, but means a specific residuum capable of independent and elaborate functioning, is brought out more conspicuously in those visions which are elaborately fabricated symbolisms of an antecedent experience. In other words, the vision is not a literal recurrence of a previous phase of consciousness, in that the latter has been worked over, so to speak, so as to appear in consciousness in a reconstructed form. Though reconstructed it either still retains its original meaning or is worked out to a completion of its thoughts, or to a fulfilment of the emotional strivings pertaining to them (anxieties, wishes, etc.). These visions, perhaps, more frequently occur spontaneously, often at moments of crises in a person’s life, but also are observed under experimental conditions. Sometimes they answer the doubts, scruples and other problems which have troubled the subject, sometimes they express the imaginary fulfilment of intense longings or of anxieties and dreads which have been entertained, or disturbing thoughts which have pricked the conscience.[[46]] We are obliged to conclude, in the light of experimental observations of the same class, that such phenomena are determined by the specific residua of antecedent thoughts which must be conserved and function in a specific manner to appear in this metamorphosed form.
Similar residual processes underlying post-hypnotic phenomena.—Conserved experiences which give rise to more complicated secondary elaboration may be observed in suggested post-hypnotic phenomena. Experiments of this kind may be varied in many ways. The phenomenon may be an hallucination similar to the one I have just described in hysterics, or a so-called subconscious calculation. You suggest in hypnosis to a suitable subject that he shall multiply certain numbers, or calculate the number of seconds intervening between certain hours—let us say between 10:43 and 5:13 o’clock—the answer to be given in writing on a certain day. The subject is then awakened immediately, before he has time to do the calculation while in hypnosis. Later, if the experiment is successful, at the time designated the subject will absent-mindedly or automatically write the figures giving the answer.
There are two modes in which these calculations may be accomplished. In a special and limited class of cases, where there is a large split-off subconscious personality, or doubling of consciousness, the calculation may be made entirely by this secondary subconscious self, in the same fashion as it would be made by the principal personality if the problem were given in the waking state. The subconscious personality will go through each conscious step in the calculation in the same way.[[47]] In a second class of cases the calculations are worked out, apparently, unconsciously, without participation in the process by a subconscious personality even when such exists. At most it would seem that isolated numbers representing different steps in the calculation arise from time to time coconsciously as a limited secondary consciousness (of which the personal consciousness is unaware) until finally the figures of the completed answer appear therein. The calculation itself appears to be still another process outside both the personal and the secondary consciousness. When the problem has been finished the answer is finally given automatically. The whole process is too complicated to go into at this time before we have studied the problems of the coconscious.[[48]] It is enough to say that it is[it is] plain that the hypnotic experience—the suggested problem—must be considered as some kind of specific residuum, psychological or neural, and that this residuum must be one capable of quite elaborate independent and subconscious intellectual activity before finally becoming transformed into the final answer.
Residual processes underlying dreams.—When citing the evidence of dreams for the conservation of forgotten experiences I spoke of one type of dream as a symbolical memory. I may now add it is more than this; it is a fabrication. The original experience or thought may appear in the dream after being worked over into a fantasy, allegory, symbolism, or other product of imagination. Such a dream is not a recurrent phase of consciousness, but a newly fabricated phase. Further, analytical and experimental researches go to show that the fabrication is performed by the original phase without the latter recurring in the content of the personal consciousness. The original phase must therefore have been conserved in some form capable of such independent and specific functioning, i.e., fabrication below the threshold of consciousness. For instance:
The subject dreamed that she was standing where two roads separated. One was broad and bright and beautiful, and many people she knew were going that way. The other road was the rocky path, quite dark, and no one was going that way, but she had to go. And she said, “Oh, why must I go this way? Will no one go with me?” And a voice replied, “I will go with you.” She looked around, and there were some tall black figures; they all had names across their foreheads in bright letters, and the one who spoke was Disappointment; and all the others said, “We will go with you,” and they were Sorrow, Loss, Pain, Fear, and Loneliness, and she fell down on her face in anguish.
Now an analysis of the antecedent thought of this subject and a knowledge of her circumstances and mental life, though we cannot go into them here, make it perfectly clear that as a fact, whether there was any causal connection or not, this dream was a symbolic expression of those thoughts. The rocky path has been shown to be symbolic of her conception of her own life entertained through years—the other road symbolic of the life longed for and imagined as granted to others. Likewise the rest of the dream symbolized, in a way which any one can easily recognize, the lot which she had in her disappointment actually fancied was hers. The thoughts thus symbolized had been constantly recurring thoughts and therefore had been conserved. They were reproduced in the dream, not in their original form, but translated into symbols and an allegory. Something must, therefore, have effected the translation. In other words, the dream is not a recurrent phase of consciousness but an allegorical fabrication which expresses these thoughts, not literally as they originally occurred, but in the form of an imaginative story. Now the similarity of the allegorical dream thoughts to the original thoughts can be explained only in two ways: either as pure chance coincidence, or through a relation of cause and effect. In the latter case the dream might have been determined either by the specific antecedent thoughts in question—those revealed as memories in the analysis, or both series might have been determined by a third, as yet unrevealed, series. For the purposes of the present problem it is immaterial which so long as the dream was determined by some antecedent thought. The very great frequency, not to say universality, with which this same similarity or a logical relation with antecedent thoughts is found in dreams after analysis renders chance coincidence very improbable. We must believe, therefore, that the dream was determined by antecedent experiences. It is beyond my purpose to enter here into an exposition of the theory of the mechanism of dreams, although I shall touch upon it later in some detail in connection with subconscious processes. We need here only concern ourselves with this mechanism so far as it bears upon the principle of conservation. Suffice it to say that analytical observations (Freud) have, it seems to me, conclusively shown that conserved experiences may be not only the determining factors in dreams, but that while in a state of conservation they are capable of undergoing elaborate fabrication and afterwards appearing so thoroughly transformed in consciousness as not to be superficially recognizable. I have also been able to reach the same conclusions by the method of experimental production of dreams.
The only question is, in what form can a thought be so conserved that it can, while still in a state of conservation, without itself rising into consciousness, fabricate a symbolism, allegory, or other work requiring imagination and reasoning? The only logical and intelligible inference is that the antecedent conscious experience has been either itself specifically conserved as such outside of the personal consciousness, or has left some neural residuum or disposition capable of functioning and constructing the conscious dream fabrication.
Residual processes underlying physiological bodily disturbances.—Before proceeding further I would invite your attention to another class of facts as these facts must be taken into consideration in any theory of conservation. These facts show that the residua can, by subconscious functioning, induce physiological bodily manifestations without reproducing the original mental experience as conscious memory. In certain abnormal conditions of the nervous system, i.e., in certain psychoneuroses, we meet with certain involuntary actions of the limbs or muscles known as spasms and contractures; also with certain impairment of functions such as blindness, deafness, loss of sensation (anesthesia), paralysis, etc. These disturbances are purely functional, meaning that they are not due to any organic disease. Now the evidence seems to be conclusive that these physiological disturbances are caused sometimes by ideas after they have passed out of consciousness and become, as ideas, dormant, i.e., while they are in a state of conservation and have ceased to be ideas—or, at least, ideas of which the subject is aware. A moment’s consideration will convince you that this means that ideas, or, at least, experiences in a state of conservation, and without being reproduced as conscious memory, can so function as to affect the body in one or other of the ways I have mentioned. To do this they must exist in some specific form that is independent of the personal consciousness of the moment. To take, for example, an actual case which I have elsewhere described:
B. C. A., in a dream, had a visual hallucination of a flash of light which revealed a scene in a cave and which was followed by blindness such as would physiologically follow a tremendous flash. In the dream she is warned that if she looks into the cave, she will be blinded. She looks; there is a blinding flash and loss of vision follows; after waking she was still partially blind, but she continued from time to time to see momentary flashes of light revealing certain of the objects seen in the dream in the cave, and these flashes would be succeeded temporarily by absolute blindness as in the dream. She had no memory of the dream. Now psychological analysis disclosed the meaning of the dream; it was a symbolical representation of certain conserved (subconscious) previous thoughts—thoughts apprehensive of the future into which she dared not look, thinking she would be overwhelmed. While in a state of conservation the residua of these antecedent thoughts had translated themselves into the symbolical hallucination of the dream and the loss of vision. Similarly after waking, although she had no memory of the dream, the conserved residua of the same thoughts continued to translate themselves into visual hallucinations and to induce blindness.[[49]] It would take too long for me to enter here into the details of the analysis which forces this conclusion.[[50]]
Similarly, as is well known, convulsions resembling epilepsy, paralysis, spasms, tics, contractures, etc., may be caused directly or indirectly by ideas, after they have passed out of consciousness and ceased to take part in the conscious processes of thought. At least that is the interpretation which the facts elicited by the various methods of investigation seem to require.
There is an analogous class of phenomena which ought to be mentioned among the possible data bearing upon the theory of memory, although too much weight cannot be placed upon them as their interpretation is not wholly clear. I will discuss them in detail later in connection with the phenomena of the emotions. They are certain emotional phenomena which are attributed by some writers to ideas in a state of conservation. It has been demonstrated that ideas to which strong feeling tones are attached are accompanied by such physiological effects as disturbance of respiration, of the heart’s action, of the vaso-motor system, of the secretions, etc., and also by certain galvanic phenomena which are due to the diminution of the electrical resistance of the body, probably caused by increased secretion of sweat.[[51]]
Now the point is that such phenomena are sometimes experimentally obtained in connection with certain test words[[52]] spoken to the subject experimented upon, although he has no recollection of any incident in his life which could have given an emotional tone to the word and, therefore, can give no explanation of the physical reaction. By various technical methods, however, memories of a forgotten emotional experience in which the idea (represented by the word) plays a part and through which it derived its emotional tone are resurrected. I have been able to obtain such reactions from test words which investigation showed referred to the incidents of terrifying dreams which were completely forgotten in the waking state. When the test word was given, the subject might, for instance, exhibit a respiratory disturbance—a sudden gasp—without conscious knowledge of its significance, and the galvanometer, with which the subject was in circuit, would show a wide deflection. Recovery of the dream in hypnosis would explain the meaning of the emotional disturbance excited by the word. The interpretation which has been put upon such phenomena is that the residua of the forgotten experience are “struck” by the test word. As the forgotten experience originally included the emotion and its physiological reaction, so the residua are linked by association to the emotional mechanism and when stimulated function as a subconscious process and excite the reaction. If this interpretation, strongly held by some, be correct, the phenomena are important for the support they give to the theory of conservation. They would indicate that conscious experiences must be conserved in a very specific subconscious form, one that is capable, without becoming conscious memory, of exciting the physiological apparatus of the emotions in a manner identical with that of conscious emotional ideas. They are open, however, to a simpler explanation, whether more probable or not: namely, that it is not the residua of the forgotten experience which unconsciously excite the physiological reaction, but the auditory symbol, the test word itself. The symbol having been once associated with the emotional reaction, it afterwards of itself, through a short circuit so to speak, suffices to induce the reaction, though the origin of the association has been forgotten and, therefore, the subject is in entire ignorance of the reason for the strong feeling manifestation. On the other hand, in some instances test words associated with emotional experiences which originally were entirely coconscious and had never entered conscious awareness at all give the reactions in question.[[53]] As coconscious memories of such experiences can be demonstrated it would seem at first sight as if under such conditions the word-reactions must come from a true subconscious process—the subconscious memory. And yet even here it is difficult to eliminate absolutely the possibility of the second interpretation. There are, however, a large number of emotional phenomena occurring in pathological conditions which can only be intelligibly interpreted as being due to the residua of previously conscious experiences functioning as a subconscious process. These phenomena we shall have occasion to review in succeeding lectures. They are too complex to enter upon at this stage.
Aside, then, from these word-reactions we have a sufficient number of other phenomena, such as I have cited, which indicate that conscious experiences when conserved must persist in a form capable of exciting purely physiological reactions without the experiences themselves rising into consciousness again as memory. The form must also be one which permits of their functioning as intelligent processes although not within the conscious field of awareness of the moment.
As a final summing up of the experiments and observations of the kind which I have thus far cited, dealing with forgotten experiences, we may say that they lead us to the following conclusions:
1. That conservation is something very different from reproduction.
2. A given experience is conserved through the medium of some kind of residuum of that experience. This residuum must have a specific existence independent of consciousness, in that it is capable of specific and independent functioning, coincidentally with and outside of the consciousness of any given moment. Its nature must be such that it can incite through specific processes the following phenomena in none of which the conscious processes of the moment take part as factors:
(a) Specific memory for the given experience expressed through the established physiological mechanisms of external expression (speech, writing, gestures) after the manner of a mnesic process.
(b) A mnesic hallucination which is a representation of the antecedent perceptual experience but after having undergone translation into terms of another sense.
(c) A mnesic hallucination in which the original experience appears synthesized with various other experiences into an elaborate representation of a complex experience, or secondarily elaborated into a symbolism, allegory or other fabrication.
(d) Mnesic phenomena which are a logical continuation of the antecedent conscious experiences and such as ordinarily are produced by conscious processes of thought—reasoning, imagination, volition (mathematical calculations, versification, fabrication, etc.).
(e) Physical phenomena (paralyses contractures, vasomotor disturbances, etc.).
In other words a specific experience while in a state of conservation and without being reproduced in consciousness can incite or induce processes which incite these and similar phenomena.
[46]. For specific instances, see Lecture VII.
[47]. Morton Prince: Experimental Evidence for Coconscious Ideation, Journal of Abnormal Psychology, April-May, 1908.
[48]. For further details, see Lecture VI, p. 169.
[49]. Prince: Mechanism and Interpretation of Dreams, Jour. of Abn. Psych., October-November, 1910.
[50]. If, lacking this knowledge of the data, any one chooses to insist that it was not the conserved residua of previous thoughts, but of the dream itself (the only alternative entertainable explanation) which induced, after waking, the hallucinatory phenomena and blindness, we still fall back upon the same principle, namely, that of the subconscious functioning of conserved residua of a conscious experience producing a physiological (and psychological) effect.
[51]. According to recent researches of Sidis in conjunction with Kalmus, and later with Nelson (The Nature and Causation of the Galvanic Phenomenon, Psychological Review, March, 1910) similar galvanic phenomena under similar conditions may be caused by the generation of an electric current within the body.
[52]. The test word (e. g., boat, stone, hat, etc.) of course represents an idea which may have various associations in the mind of the subject.
[53]. Morton Prince and Frederick Peterson: Experiments in Psycho-Galvanic Reactions from Coconscious (Subconscious) Ideas in a Case of Multiple Personality, Journal of Abnormal Psychology, April-May, 1908.
LECTURE V
NEUROGRAMS
We have got as far as showing that the phenomena of memory to be intelligible require that ideas which have passed out of mind must be conserved through some sort of residuum left by the original experience. But this as a theory of memory is incomplete; the question remains, How, and in what form, manner, or way, are they conserved? In other words, What is the nature of the residuum? Is it psychical or physical?[[54]] As we have seen, from the fact that something outside of the personal consciousness can manifest memory of a given experience at the very same moment when the personal consciousness has amnesia for that experience, we are compelled to infer that conservation must be by a medium, psychological or physiological, capable of being excited as a specific secondary process. Now this medium must be either an undifferentiated “Psyche” or specific differentiated residua. In the former case we postulate a concept of a transcendental something beyond experience and of which, like the soul after death, we have and can have no knowledge. To this concept of an undifferentiated Psyche we shall return presently.
If the second alternative—specific differentiated residua—be the medium by which experiences are conserved, then the residua must be either specific psychological states, i.e., the original psychological experience itself as such; or neural residua (or dispositions) such as when excited are ordinarily correlated with a conscious memory. In either case the medium would be such as to permit of the experiences manifesting themselves, while so conserved outside of the personal consciousness, as a very specific secondary process, not only reproducing the original experience as memory, but elaborating the same and exhibiting imagination, reasoning, volition, feeling, etc. Unless the doctrine of the undifferentiated Psyche be accepted it is difficult to conceive of any other mode in which conservation can be effected so as to permit of the phenomena of memory outside of consciousness.
Conservation considered as psychological residua.—It is hypothetically possible that our thoughts and other mental experiences after they have passed out of mind, out of our awareness of the moment, may continue their psychological existence as such although we are not aware of them. Such an hypothesis derives support from the fact that researches of recent years in abnormal psychology have given convincing evidence that an idea, under certain conditions, after it has passed out of our awareness may still from time to time take on another sort of existence, one in which it still remains an idea, although our personal consciousness of the moment is not aware of it. A coconscious idea, it may be called. More than this, in absent-mindedness, in states of abstraction, in artificial conditions as typified in automatic writing, and particularly in pathological conditions (hysteria), it has been fairly demonstrated, as I think we are entitled to assert, that coconscious ideas in the form of sensations, perceptions, thoughts, even large systems of ideas, may function and pursue autonomous and contemporaneous activity outside of the various systems of ideas which make up the personal consciousness. It usually is not possible for the individual to bring such ideas within the focus of his awareness. Therefore, there necessarily results a doubling of consciousness,—two consciousnesses, one of which is the personal consciousness and the other a coconsciousness. These phenomena need to be studied by themselves. We shall consider them here only so far as they bear on the problem of conscious memory. Observation has shown that among ideas of this kind it often happens that many are memories, reproductions of ideas that once belonged to the personal consciousness. Hence, on first thought, it seems plausible that conservation might be effected by the content of any moment’s consciousness becoming coconscious after the ideas have passed out of awareness. According to such an hypothesis all the conscious experiences of our lives, that are conserved, would form a great coconscious field where they would continue their existence in specific form as ideas, and whence they could be drawn upon for use at any future time.
Various difficulties are raised by this hypothesis. In the first place, there is no evidence that coconscious ideas have a continuous existence. The technical methods of investigation which give evidence of such ideas functioning outside of the awareness of the personal consciousness do not show that at any given moment they are any more extensive than are those which fill the field of the personal consciousness. Indeed, usually, the coconscious field is of very limited extent. There remains an enormous field of conserved experiences to be accounted for. So far then as coconscious ideas can be discovered by our methods of investigation they are inadequate to account for the whole of the conservation of life’s experiences.
In the second place, these ideas come and go in the same fashion as do those which make up the content of the main personal consciousness; and many are constantly recurring to become coconscious memories. The same problem, of the nature of conservation, therefore confronts us with coconscious ideas in the determination of the mechanism of coconscious memory. To explain conservation through coconscious ideas is but a shifting of the problem. If a broader concept be maintained, namely, that this coconsciousness, which can be demonstrated in special conditions, is but a fraction of the sum total of coconscious ideas outside of the personal awareness, we are confronted with a concept which from its philosophical nature deals with postulates beyond experience. We can neither prove nor disprove it. There is much that can be said in its support for the deeper we dive into the subconscious regions of the mind the more extensively do we come across evidences of coconscious states underlying specific phenomena. Nevertheless, the demonstration of coconscious states in any number of specific phenomena does not touch the problem of the nature of conservation. In weighing the probability of the hypothesis on theoretical grounds it would seem, as I have already said in a preceding lecture, to be hardly conceivable that ideas that had passed out of mind, the thoughts of the moment of which we are no longer aware, can be treasured, conserved as such in a sort of psychological storehouse or reservoir of consciousness, just as if they were static or material facts. Such a conception would require that every specific state of consciousness, every idea, every thought, perception, sensation and feeling, after it had passed out of mind for the moment, should enter a great sea of ideas which would be the sum total of all our past experiences. In this sum-total millions of ideas would have to be conserved in concrete form until wanted again for use by the personal consciousness of the moment. Here would be found, in what you will see at once would be a real subconscious mind beyond the content or confines of our awareness, stored up, so to speak, ready for future use, the mass of our past mental experiences. Here you would find, perhaps, the visualized idea of a seagull soaring over the waters of your beautiful bay conserved in association with the idea of the mathematical formula, a + b = c; the one having originated in a perception of the outer world through the window of your study while you were working at a lesson in algebra which gave rise to the latter. And yet conserved as ideas, as such vast numbers of experiences would be, we should not be aware of them until they were brought by some mysterious agency into the consciousness of the moment. The great mass of the mental experiences of our lives which we have at our command, our extensive educational and other acquisitions from which we consciously borrow from time to time, as well as those which, we have seen, are conserved though they cannot be voluntarily reproduced, all these mental experiences, by the hypothesis, would still have persisting conscious existences in their original concrete psychological form.
Such an hypothesis, to my mind, is hardly thinkable, and yet this very hypothesis has been proposed, though in less concrete form perhaps, in the doctrine of the “subliminal mind,” a particular form of the theory of the subconscious mind. This doctrine, which we owe to the genius of the late W. H. H. Meyers, has more recently appeared, without full recognition of its paternity, in the writings of a more modern school of psychology. According to this doctrine our personal consciousness, the ideas which we have at any given moment and of which we are aware, are but a small portion of the sum total of our consciousness. Of this sum-total we are aware, at any given moment, of only a fractional portion. Our personal consciousness is but sort of up-rushes from this great sum of conscious states which have been called the subliminal mind, the subliminal self, the subconscious self. These conscious up-rushes make up the personal “I,” with the sense of awareness for their content.
The facts to be explained do not require such a metaphysical hypothesis. All that is required is that our continuously occurring experiences should be conserved in a form, and by an arrangement, which will allow the concrete ideas belonging to them to reappear in consciousness whenever the conserved arrangement is again stimulated. This requirement, the theory of conservation, which is generally accepted by those who approach the problem by psycho-physiological methods, fully satisfies. Before stating this theory in specific form let me mention to you still another variety of the subliminal hypothesis, metaphysical in its nature, which appeals to some minds of a philosophical tendency.
Conservation considered as an undifferentiated psychical something or “psyche.”—It is difficult to state this hypothesis clearly and precisely for it is necessarily vague, transcending as it does human experience. It is conceived, as I understand the matter, or at least the hypothesis connotes, that ideas of the moment, after ceasing to be a part of awareness, subside and become merged in some form or other in a larger mind or consciousness of which they were momentary concrete manifestations or phases. This consciousness is conceived as a sort of unity. Ideas out of awareness still persist as consciousness in some form though not necessarily as specific ideas. According to this hypothesis, it is evident that when the ideas of the moment’s awareness subside and become merged into the larger consciousness either one of two things must happen; they must either be conserved as specific ideas, or lose their individuality as states of consciousness, and become fused in this larger consciousness as an undifferentiated psychical something. Some like to call it a “psyche,” apparently finding that by using a Greek term, or a more abstract expression, they avoid the difficulties of clear thinking.
The first alternative is equivalent to the hypothesis of conservation in the form of coconscious specific ideas which we have just discussed. The second alternative still leaves unexplained the mechanism by which differentiation again takes place in this psychical unity, how a conscious unity becomes differentiated again into and makes up the various phases (ideas) of consciousness at each moment; that is, the mechanism of memory.
But, aside from this difficulty, the hypothesis is opposed by evidence which we have already found for the persistence of ideas (after cessation as states of consciousness) in some concrete form capable of very specific activity and of producing very specific effects. We have seen that such ideas may under certain conditions continue to manifest the same specific functionating activity as if continuing their existence in concrete form (e. g., so-called subconscious solution of problems, physiological disturbances, etc.). This phenomenon is scarcely reconcilable with the hypothesis that ideas after passing out of awareness lose their concrete specificity and become merged into an undifferentiated psychical something.[[55]]
Furthermore, for a concept transcending experience to be acceptable it must be shown that it adequately explains all the known facts, is incompatible with none, and that the facts are not intelligible on any other known principle. These conditions seem to me far from having been fulfilled. Before accepting such a concept it is desirable to see if conservation cannot be brought under some principle within the domain of experience.
Conservation considered as physical residua.—Now the theory of memory which offers a satisfactory explanation of the mode in which registration, conservation, and reproduction occur postulates the conserved residua as physical in nature. Whenever we have a mental experience of any kind—a thought, or perception of the environment, or feeling—some change, some “trace,” is left in the neurons of the brain. I need not here discuss the relation between brain activity and mind activity. It is enough to remind you that, whatever view be held, it is universally accepted that every mental process is accompanied by a physical process in the brain; that, parallel with every series of thoughts, perceptions, or feelings, there goes a series of physical changes of some kind in the brain neurons. And, conversely, whenever this same series of physical changes occurs the corresponding series of mental processes, that is, of states of consciousness, arises. In other words, physical brain processes or experiences are correlated with corresponding mind processes or experiences, and vice versa.[[56]] This is known as the doctrine of psycho-physical parallelism. Upon this doctrine the whole of psycho-physiology and psycho-pathology rests. Mental physiology, cerebral localization, and mental diseases excepting on its assumption are unintelligible—indeed, the brain as the organ of the mind becomes meaningless. We need not here inquire into the nature of the parallelism, whether it is of the nature of dualism, e. g., a parallelism of two different kinds of facts, one psychical and the other physical; or whether it is a monism, i.e., a parallelism of two different aspects of one and the same fact or a parallelism of a single reality (mind) with a mode of apprehending it (matter)—mind and matter in their inner nature being held to be practically one and the same. The theory of memory is unaffected whichever view of the mind-brain relation be held.
Now, according to the psycho-physiological theory of memory, with every passing state of conscious experience, with every idea, thought, or perception, the brain process that goes along with it leaves some trace, some residue of itself, within the neurons and in the functional arrangements between them. It is an accepted principle of physiology that when a number of neurons, involved, let us say, in a coördinated sensori-motor act, are stimulated into functional activity they become so associated and the paths between them become so opened or, as it were, sensitized, that a disposition becomes established for the whole group, or a number of different groups, to function together and reproduce the original reaction when either one or the other is afterward stimulated into activity. This “disposition” is spoken of in physiological language as a lowering of the threshold of excitability—a term which does not explain but only describes the fact. For an explanation we must look to the nature of the physical change that is wrought in the neurons by the initial functioning. This change we may speak of as a residuum.
Similarly a system of brain neurons, which in any experience is correlated in activity with conscious experience, becomes, so to speak, sensitized and acquires, in consequence, a “disposition” to function again as a system (lowering of thresholds?) in a like fashion; so that when one element in the system is again stimulated it reproduces the whole original brain process, and with this reproduction (according to the doctrine of psycho-physical parallelism) there is a reproduction of the original conscious experience. In other words, without binding ourselves down to absolute precision of language, it is sufficiently accurate to say that every mental experience leaves behind a residue, or a trace, of the physical brain process in the chain of brain neurons. This residue is the physical register of the mental experience. This physical register may be conserved or not. If it is conserved we have the requisite condition for memory; the form in which our mental experiences are conserved. But it is not until these physical registers are stimulated and the original brain experience is reproduced that we have memory. If this occurs the reproduction of the brain experience reproduces the conscious experience, i.e., conscious memory (according to whatever theory of parallelism is maintained). Thus in all ideation, in every process of thought, the record of the conscious stream may be registered and conserved in the correlated neural process. Consequently, the neurons in retaining residua of the original process become, to a greater or less degree, organized into a functioning system corresponding to the system of ideas of the original mental process and capable of reproducing it. When we reproduce the original ideas in the form of memories it is because there is a reproduction of the physiological neural process.
It is important to note that just as, on the psychological side, memory always involves the awakening of a previous conscious experience by an associated idea, one that was an element in the previous system of associated sensations, perceptions, thoughts, etc., making up the experience, so, on the physiological side, we must suppose that it involves stimulation of the whole system of neurons belonging to this experience by the physiological stimulus corresponding to the conscious element or stimulus. For instance, if I see my friend A, the image is not a memory, though it is one I have had many times before and has left residua of itself capable of being reproduced as memory. But if I see his hat, and immediately previously linked pictorial images of him arise in my mind; or, if, when I see him, there arise images of his library in which I have previously seen him, these images are memory. A conscious memory is always the reproduction of an experience by an associated idea or other element of experience (conscious or subconscious). Similarly we must infer that the neurons correlated with any past mental experience are stimulated by associated neuron processes. This is the foundation-stone of mental physiology; for upon the general principle of the correlation of mental processes with neural processes rests the whole of cerebral localization and brain physiology.
Although we assume newly arranged dynamic associations of neurons corresponding to associations of ideas, we do not know how this rearrangement is brought about, though we may conceive of it as following the physiological laws of lowering of thresholds of excitability. Nor do we know whether the modifications left as residua (by which the thresholds are lowered) are physical or chemical in their nature, though there is some reason for believing they may be chemical.
Chemical and physical theories of residua.—It is possible that, through chemical changes of some kind left in the system of neurons corresponding to an experience, the neurons may become sensitized so as to react again as a whole to a second stimulus applied to one element. In other words a hyper-susceptibility may become established. There is a physiological phenomenon, known as anaphylaxis, which may possibly prove more than analogous, in that it depends upon the production, through chemical changes, of hyper-susceptibility to a stimulus which before was inert. The phenomenon is one of sensitizing the body to certain previously innocuous substances. If, for instance, a serum from a horse be injected into a guinea pig no observable reaction follows. But, if a second dose be injected, a very pronounced reaction follows and the animal dies with striking manifestations called anaphylactic shock. This consists of spasm of the bronchioles of the lungs induced by contraction of their unstriated muscles and results in an attack of asphyxia.[[57]]
The mechanism of anaphylaxis is a very complicated one involving the production in the blood of chemical substances called antibodies, and is far from being thoroughly understood. One theory is that sensitization consists in the “fixing” of the cells of the tissues with these antibodies. This may or may not be correct—probably not—and I am far from wishing to imply that sensitization of the neurons, as a consequence of functioning, has anything in common with the mechanism of sensitizing the body in anaphylaxis. I merely wish to point out that sensitizing nervous tissue through chemical changes is a physiological concept quite within the bounds of possibility; and, as all functioning is probably accompanied by metabolic (chemical) changes, such metabolic changes may well persist in neurons after brain reactions produce sensitization.
If this hypothesis of sensitization should be proven it would offer an intelligible mechanism of the phenomenon of memory. If the system of neurons engaged in any conscious experience were sensitized by chemical changes it would acquire a hyper-susceptibility. The system as a whole would consequently be excited into activity by any other functioning system of neurons with which it was in anatomical association and might reproduce the originally correlated conscious experience.
Various theories based on known or theoretical chemical or physical alterations in the neurons have been proposed to account for memory on the physiological side. Robertson[[58]] has proposed that it is of the nature of autocatalysis. Catalysis is the property possessed by certain bodies called catalyzers of initiating or accelerating chemical reactions which would take place without the catalyzer, but more slowly. “A catalyzer is a stimulus which excites a transformation of energy. The catalyzer plays the same rôle in a chemical transformation as does the minimal exciting force which sets free the accumulation of potential energy previous to its transformation into kinetic energy. A catalyzer is the friction of the match which sets free the chemical energy of the powder magazine.”[[59]]
Numerous examples of catalytic actions might be given from chemistry. The inversion of sugar by acids, the decomposition of hydrogen peroxide by platinum black, fermentation by means of a soluble ferment or diastase, a phenomenon which may almost be called vital, are all instances. According to Leduc “the action of pepsin, of the pancreatic ferment, of zymase and other similar ferments has a great analogy with the purely physical phenomenon of catalysis.”
In auto-catalysis one of the products of the reaction acts as the catalyzer. Now Robertson concluded, as a result of his experiments carried out on frogs, that the processes which accompany the excitation of the cells of the neurons are of the nature of catalysis; for he found that they have as one effect the production of an acid; and he also found that acids accelerate such processes which he concludes to be probably of the nature of oxidations. “The chemical phenomena which constitute the activity of a neuron cell,” he says, “seem to us then an auto-catalytic oxidation, that is to say, an oxidation in which one of the products of the reaction acts as a catalyzer in the reaction.” It occurred to him then that the physiological correlate of memory might be explained on the principle of auto-catalysis. When, to test this hypothesis, he came to compare the results of certain psychological experiments on memory, made by two different experimenters (Ebbinghaus and Smith), with the law characteristic of auto-catalytic chemical reactions, he found that they corresponded in a surprisingly close way with this law. That is to say, assuming the value of the residua of memory (measured by the number of syllables learnt by heart) to be proportional to the mass of the chemical product of auto-catalysis, we should expect that the increase of the number of syllables or other experiences retained by memory following increase of repetitions would obey the law of catalytic reaction as expressed in the mathematical formula established for the reaction. Now, as a fact, he found that the number of syllables that should be so retained in memory, as calculated theoretically by the formula, corresponded in a remarkable way with the actual number determined by experiment. “The agreement was closer,” the author states, “than that which generally obtained in experiments in chemical dynamics carried out in vitro.” Robertson sums up his conclusions as follows:
“5th. We have shown that the phenomenon of which the subjective aspect is called ‘memory’ is of a nature indicating that the autocatalyzed chemical reactions form the mechanism conditioning the response of the central nervous system to stimuli.
“6th. In admitting that the extent of the trace of memory may be proportionate to the mass of a product of an autocatalyzed chemical reaction unfolding itself in the central nervous system as the result of the application of a stimulus, we have shown that the relation which one theoretically deduces between the mass of memory material and the number of repetitions corresponds to that which has been found by experience.
“7th. On the basis of the hypothesis above mentioned we have shown that the law of Weber-Fechner admits of a rational physico-chemical interpretation, and that the result thus obtained, provided the hypothesis above mentioned be an exact representation of facts, is that the intensity of the sensation is at each instant proportionate to the mass of the product of the autocatalyzed chemical reaction above mentioned and, consequently, to the extent of the trace of memory.”
While it is easy to understand that auto-catalysis may take part in the chemical process which underlies the performance of simple volition, as inferred by Robertson,[[60]] and perhaps reproduction in the memory process, it is difficult to understand how such a chemical action can explain conservation. The problem is not that of acceleration of an action, but of something like the storing up of energy.
Rignano[[61]] has proposed an hypothesis according to which the cells of the nervous system are to be considered as so many accumulators, analogous to electric accumulators or storage batteries. “The similarities and differences which nerve currents present in comparison with electric currents warrant us in assuming in nerve currents some of the properties of electric currents, and in attributing at the same time to the first other properties which the electric do not possess, provided these qualities are not incompatible with the others.”
Now, according to the hypothesis, the specific nervous current set up by any stimulus forms and deposits in the nucleus of the cells (through which the current flows) a substance which adds itself to the others already there without changing them and which is capable, under appropriate conditions, of being discharged and restoring the same specific current by which it was produced. Each cell thus becomes what Rignano calls an elementary nervous accumulator. He points out that “both the conception of accumulators of nervous energy in tension, and that of accumulators of a specific nervous energy constituting their specific irritability,” which the hypothesis includes, are not new but “an ordinary conception very generally employed.”... “The only new thing which the above definition includes is the hypothesis that the substance, which is thus capable of giving as a discharge a given nervous current, was produced and deposited only by a nervous current of the same specificity, but in the inverse direction, and could have been produced and deposited only by such a current.” "In just this capacity of restoring again the same specificity of nervous current as that by which each element had been deposited one would look for the cause of the mnemonic faculty, in the widest sense, which all living matter possesses. And further the very essence of the mnemonic faculty would consist entirely in this restitution.“
”The specific elementary accumulators (previously termed specific potential elements) are thus susceptible now of receiving a third name, namely, that of mnemonic elements." “The preservation of memories is to be ascribed to the accumulations of substance,” while “the reawakening of these memories consists in the restitution of the same currents [by discharge of the substance] as had formerly constituted the actual sensation or impression.”
By this hypothesis Rignano explains not only memory but the inheritance of acquired characters and the whole process of specialization of cells, all of which phenomena are special instances of such elementary accumulators of organic energy being formed and discharged.
Any attempt, with our present knowledge, to postulate particular kinds of chemical or physical changes in the nervous system as the theoretical residua of physiological dispositions left by psychological experiences must necessarily be speculative. And any hypothesis can only have so much validity as may come from its capability of explaining the known facts. It is interesting, however, to note some of the directions which attempts have taken to find a solution of the problem. For the present it is best to rest content with the theory to which we have been led, step by step, in our exposition, namely, that conservation is effected by some sort of physiological residua. This theory, of course, is an old one, and has been expressed by many writers. What we want, however, is not expressions of opinion but facts supporting them. It would seem as if the facts accumulated in recent years by experimental and abnormal psychology all tended to strengthen the theory, notwithstanding an inclination in certain directions to seek a psychological interpretation of conservation.
Some minds of a certain philosophical bent will not be able to get over the difficulty of conceiving how a psychological process can be conserved by the physical residuum of a physiological process. But this is only the old difficulty involved in the problem of the relation between mind and brain of which conservation is only a special example. That a mind process and a brain process are so intimately related that either one determines the other there is no question. It is assumed in every question of psycho-physiology. The only question is the How. I may point out in passing, but without discussion, that if we adopt the doctrine of panpsychism for which I have elsewhere argued[[62]]—namely, that there is only one process—the mental—in one and the same individual, and that what we know as the physical process is only the mode of apprehending the mental process by another individual; if we adopt this doctrine of monism the difficulty is solved. In other words, the psychical (and consciousness) is reality, while matter (and physical process) is a phenomenon, the disguise, so to speak, under which the psychical appears when apprehended through the special senses. According to this view in their last analysis all physical facts are psychical in nature, although not psychological (for psychological means consciousness), so that physiological and psychical are one. To this point I shall return in another lecture.
Neurograms.—Whatever may be the exact nature of the theoretical alterations left in the brain by life’s experiences they have received various generic terms; more commonly “brain residua,” and “brain dispositions.” I have been in the habit of using the term neurograms to characterize these brain records. Just as telegram, Marconigram, and phonogram precisely characterize the form in which the physical phenomena which correspond to our (verbally or scripturally expressed) thoughts, are recorded and conserved, so neurogram precisely characterizes my conception of the form in which a system of brain processes corresponding to thoughts and other mental experiences is recorded and conserved.[[63]]
Of course it must not be overlooked that such neurograms are pure theoretical conceptions, and have never been demonstrated by objective methods of physical research. They stand in exactly the same position as the atoms and molecules and ions and electrons of physics and chemistry, and the “antibodies” and “complements” of bacteriology. No one has seen any of these postulates of science. They are only inferred. All are theoretical concepts; but they are necessary concepts if the phenomena of physical, chemical, and bacteriological science are to be intelligible. The same may be said for brain changes if the phenomena of brain and mind are to be intelligible.
And so it happens that though our ideas pass out of mind, are forgotten for the moment, and become dormant, their physiological records still remain, as sort of vestigia, much as the records of our spoken thoughts are recorded on the moving wax cylinder of the phonograph. When the cylinder revolves again the thoughts once more are reproduced as auditory language. A better analogy would be the recording and reproducing of our thoughts by the dynamic magnetization of the iron wire in another type of the instrument. The vibration of the voice by means of a particular electrical mechanism leaves dynamic traces in the form of corresponding magnetic changes in the passing wire, and when the magnetized wire again is passed before the reproducing diaphragm the spoken thoughts are again reproduced. So, when the ideas of any given conscious experience become dormant, the physiological records, or dynamic rearrangements, still remain organized as physiological unconscious complexes, and, with the excitation of these physiological complexes, the corresponding psychological memories awake.
It is only as such physiological complexes that ideas that have become dormant can be regarded as still existing. If our knowledge were deep enough, if by any technical method we could determine the exact character of the modifications of the dispositions of the neurons that remain as vestiges of thought and could decipher their meaning, we could theoretically read in our brains the record of our lives, as if graphically inscribed on a tablet. As Ribot has well expressed it: “... Feelings, ideas, and intellectual actions in general are not fixed and only become a portion of memory when there are corresponding residua in the nervous system—residua consisting, as we have previously demonstrated, of nervous elements, and dynamic associations among those elements. On this condition, and this only, can there be conservation and reproduction.”[[64]] Dormant ideas are thus equivalent to conserved physiological complexes. We may use either term to express the fact.
The observations and experiments I have recited have led us to the conclusion that conservation of an experience is something quite specific and distinct from the reproduction of it. They compel us to the conclusion that we are entitled, as I pointed out at the opening of these lectures, to regard memory as a process and the result of at least two factors—conservation and reproduction. But as conservation is meaningless unless there is something to be conserved, we must also assume registration; that is, that every conserved mental experience is primarily registered somehow and somewhere. Conservation implies registration.
Such is the theory of memory as a process of registration, conservation, and reproduction. Thus it will be seen (according to the theory) that ideas which have passed out of mind are preserved, if at all, not as ideas, but as physical alterations or records in the brain neurons and in the functional dynamic arrangements between them.
From this you will easily understand that while, as you have seen from concrete observations, we can have conservation of experiences without memory (reproduction) we cannot have memory without conservation. Three factors are essential for memory, and memory may fail from the failure of any one of them. Unless an experience is registered in some form there will be nothing to preserve, and memory will fail because of lack of registration. If the experience has been registered, memory may fail, owing to the registration having faded out, so to speak, either with time or from some other reason; that is, nothing having been conserved, nothing can be reproduced. Finally, though an experience has been registered and conserved, memory may still fail, owing to failure of reproduction. The neurographic records must be made active once more, stimulated into an active process, in order that the original experience may be recalled, i.e., reproduced. Thus what we call conscious memory is the final result of a process involving the three factors, registration, conservation, and reproduction.
Physiological memory.—Memory as commonly regarded and known to psychology is a conscious manifestation but, plainly, if we regard it, as we have thus far, as a process, then, logically, we are entitled to regard any process which consists of the three factors, registration, conservation, and reproduction of experiences, as memory, whether the final result be the reproduction of a conscious experience, or one to which no consciousness was ever attached. In other words, theoretically it is quite possible that acquired physiological body-experiences may be reproduced by exactly the same process as conscious experiences, and their reproduction would be entitled to be regarded as memory quite as much as if the experience were one of consciousness. In principle it is evident that it is entirely immaterial whether that which is reproduced is a conscious or an unconscious experience so long as the mechanism of the process is the same.
Now, as a matter of fact, there are a large number of acquired physiological body-actions which, though unconscious, must be regarded quite as much as manifestations of memory as is the conscious repetition of the alphabet, or any other conscious acquisition. Having been acquired they are ipso facto reproductions of organized experiences. We all know very well that movements acquired volitionally, and perhaps laboriously, are, after constant repetition, reproduced with precision without conscious guidance.
They are said to be automatic; even the guiding afferent impressions do not enter the content of consciousness. The maintaining of the body in one position, sitting or standing, though requiring a complicated correlation of a large number of muscles, is carried out without conscious volition. It is the same with walking and running. Still more complicated movements are similarly performed in knitting, typewriting and playing the piano, shaving, buttoning a coat, etc. We do not even know the elementary movements involved in the action, and must become aware of them by observation. The neurons remember, i.e., conserve and reproduce the process acquired by previous conscious experiences. But though it is memory it is not conscious memory, it is unconscious memory, i.e., a physiological memory. The acquired dispositions repeat themselves—what is called habit. Precision in games of skill largely depend upon this principle. A tennis player must learn the “stroke” to play the game well. This means that the muscles must be coordinated to a delicate adjustment which, once learned, must be unconsciously remembered and used, without consciously adjusting the muscles each time the ball is hit. Indeed some organic memories are so tenacious that a player once having learned the stroke finds great difficulty even by effort of will in unlearning it and making his muscles play a different style of stroke. Likewise one who has learned to use his arms in sparring by one method finds difficulty in learning to spar by another method. In fact almost any acquired movement is compounded of elementary movements which by repetition were linked and finely adjusted to produce the resultant movement, and finally conserved as an unconscious physiological arrangement. As one writer has said, the neuron organization “faithfully preserves the records of processes often performed.”
In what has just been said the fact has not been overlooked that the initiation or modification of any of the movements which have been classed as physiological memory (knitting, typewriting, games of skill, etc.), even after their acquisition, is necessarily voluntary and therefore, so far, a conscious memory, but the nice coördination of afferent and efferent impulses for the adjustment of the muscles involved becomes, by repetition, an unconscious mechanism, and is performed outside the province of the will as an act of unconscious memory. By repeated experience the neurons become functionally organized in such a way as to acquire and conserve a functional “disposition” to reproduce the movements originally initiated by volition.
Physiological memory has indeed, as it seems, been recently experimentally demonstrated by Rothmann, who educated a dog from which the hemispheres had been removed to perform certain tricks; e. g., to jump over a hurdle.[[65]]
Still another variety of memory is psycho-physiological. This type is characterized by a combination of psychological and physiological elements and is important, as we shall see later, because of the conspicuous part which such memories play in pathological conditions. Certain bodily reactions which are purely physiological, such as vaso-motor, cardiac, respiratory, intestinal, digestive, etc., disturbances, become, as the result of certain experiences, linked with one or another psychical element (sensations, perceptions, thoughts), and, this linking becoming conserved as a “disposition,” the physiological reaction is reproduced whenever the psychical element is introduced into consciousness. Thus, for example, the perception or thought of a certain person may become, as the result of a given social episode, so linked with blushing or cardiac palpitation that whenever the former is thrust into consciousness, no matter how changed the conditions may be from those of the original episode, the physiological reaction of the blood vessels or heart is reproduced. Here the original psycho-physiological experience—the association of an idea (or psychical element) with the physiological process is conserved and reproduced[reproduced]. Such a reproduction is essentially a psycho-physiological memory depending wholly upon the acquired disposition of the neurons.[[66]]
Thus, to take an actual example from real life, a certain person during a series of years was expecting to hear bad news because of the illness of a member of the family and consequently was always startled, and her “heart always jumped into her throat,” whenever the telephone rang. Finally the news came. That anxiety is long past, but now when the telephone rings, although she is not expecting bad news and no thought of the original experience consciously arises in her mind, her “heart always gives a leap and sometimes she bursts into a perspiration.”
A beautiful illustration of this type of memory is to be found in the results of the extremely important experiments, for psychology as well as physiology, of Pawlow and his co-workers in the reflex stimulation of saliva in dogs. These experiments show the possibility of linking a physiological process to a psychological process by education, and through the conservation of the association reproducing the physiological process as an act of unconscious memory. (The experiments, of course, were undertaken for an entirely different purpose, namely, that of studying the digestive processes only.) It should be explained that it was shown that the salivary glands are selective in their reaction to stimuli in that they do not respond at all to some (pebbles, snow), but respond to others with a thin watery fluid containing mere traces of mucin or a slimy mucin-holding fluid, according as to whether the stimulating substance is one which the dog rejects, and which therefore must be washed out or diluted (sands, acids, bitter and caustic substances), or is an eatable substance and must as a food bolus be lubricated for the facilitation of its descent. Dryness of the food, too, largely determined the quantity of the saliva.
Now the experiments of the St. Petersburg laboratory brought out another fact which is of particular interest for us and which is thus described by Pawlow. “In the course of our experiments it appeared that all the phenomena of adaptation which we saw in the salivary glands under physiological conditions, such, for instance, as the introduction of the stimulating substances into the buccal cavity, reappeared in exactly the same manner under the influence of psychological conditions—that is to say, when we merely drew the animal’s attention to the substances in question. Thus, when we pretended to throw pebbles into the dog’s mouth, or to cast in sand, or to pour in something disagreeable, or, finally, when we offered it this or that kind of food, a secretion either immediately appeared or it did not appear, in accordance with the properties of the substance which we had previously seen to regulate the quantity and nature of the juice when physiologically excited to flow. If we pretended to throw in sand a watery saliva escaped from the mucous glands; if food, a slimy saliva. And if the food was dry—for example, dry bread—a large quantity of saliva flowed out even when it excited no special interest on the part of the dog. When, on the other hand, a moist food was presented—for example, flesh—much less saliva appeared than in the previous case however eagerly the dog may have desired the food. This latter effect is particularly obvious in the case of the parotid gland.”[[67]]
It is obvious that in these experiments, when the experimenter pretended to throw various substances into the dog’s mouth, the action was effective in producing the flow of saliva of specific qualities because, through repeated experiences, the pictorial images (or ideas) of the substance had become associated with the specific physiological salivary reaction, and this association had been conserved as a neurogram. Consequently the neurographic residue when stimulated each time by the pretended action of the experimenter reproduced reflexly the specific physiological reaction and, so far as the process was one of registration, conservation, and reproduction, it was an act of psycho-physiological memory.
That this is the correct interpretation of the educational mechanism is made still more evident by other results that were obtained; for it was found that the effective psychical stimulus may be part of wider experiences or a complex of ideas; everything that has been in any way psychologically associated with an object which physiologically excites the saliva reflex may also produce it; the plate which customarily contains the food, the furniture upon which it stands; the person who brings it; even the sound of the voice and the sound of the steps of this person.[[68]]
Indeed, it was found that any sensory stimulus could be educated into one that would induce the flow of saliva, if the stimulus had been previously associated with food which normally excited the flow. “Any ocular stimulus, any desired sound, any odor that might be selected, and the stimulation of any part of the skin, either by mechanical means or by the application of heat or cold, have in our hands never failed to stimulate the salivary glands, although they were all of them at one time supposed to be inefficient for such a purpose. This was accomplished by applying these stimuli simultaneously with the action of the salivary glands, this action having been evolved by the giving of certain kinds of food or by forcing certain substances into the dog’s mouth.”[[69]] It is obvious that reflex excitation thus having been accomplished by the education of the nerve centers to a previously indifferent stimulus the reproduction of the process through this stimulus is, in principle, an act of physiological memory.[[70]]
The experiences of the dogs embraced quite large systems of ideas and sensory stimuli which included the environment of persons and their actions, the furniture, plates, and other objects; and various ocular, auditory, and other sensory stimuli applied arbitrarily to the dogs. All these experiences had been welded into an associative system and conserved as neurograms. Consequently it was only necessary to stimulate again any element in the neurogram to reproduce the whole process, including the specific salivary reaction.
We shall see later that these experiments acquire additional interest from the fact that in them is to be found the fundamental principle of what under other conditions can be recognized as a psycho-neurosis—an abnormal or perverted association and memory. The effects produced by this association of stimuli may be regarded as the germ of the habit psychosis, and in these experiments we have experimental demonstration of the mechanism of these psychoses—but this is another story which we will take up by and by.
Recollection.—This is as good a place as any other to call attention to a certain special form of memory. Recollection and memory are not synonymous terms. We are accustomed to think of memory as including, in addition to other qualities, recollection, i.e., what is called localization of the experience in time and space. It connotes an awareness of the content of the memory having been once upon a time a previous experience which is more or less accurately located in a given past time (yesterday, or a year ago, or twenty years ago), and in certain local relations of space (when we were at school, or riding in a railway car with so and so). But, as Ribot points out, this (relatively to physiological memories) is ... “only a certain kind of memory which we call perfect.” For we have just seen that, when memory is considered as a process, reproduced physiological processes, which contain no elements of consciousness and therefore of localization, may be memory. But more than this, I would insist, recollection is only a more perfect kind of conscious memory. Ribot would make recollection a peculiarity of all conscious memory, but this is plainly an oversight. As we saw in previous lectures there may be conscious memories which do not contain any element of recollection, or, in other words, such conscious memories resemble in every way, in principle, the reproduction of organic neuron processes in that they have no conscious localization in the past. In dissociated personalities, for instance, and in other types of dissociated conditions (functional amnesia, post-hypnotic states, etc.), the names of persons, places, faces, objects, and even complex ideas may flash into the mind without any element of recollection. The person may have no idea whence they come, but by experiment it is easy to demonstrate that they are automatic memories of past experiences.[[71]] In the sensory automatisms known as crystal visions, pictures which accurately reproduce, symbolically, past experiences of which the subject has no recollection may vividly arise in the mind. Such pictures are real conscious symbolic memories. Dreams, too, as we have seen, may be unrecognized memories in that they may reproduce conscious experiences, something heard or seen perhaps, but which has been completely forgotten even when awake. Again, modern methods of investigation show that numerous ideas that occur in the course of our everyday thoughts—names, for instance—are excerpts from, or vestiges of, previous conscious experiences of which we have no recollection, that is to say, they are memories, reproductions of formerly experienced ideas. In the absence of recollection they seem to belong only to the present. Memories which hold an intermediate place between these automatic memories and those of true recollection are certain memories, like the alphabet or a verse or phrase once learned by heart which we are able at best to localize only dimly in the past. Indeed, the greater part of our vocabulary is but conscious memory without localization in the past. So we see that recollection is not an essential even for conscious memories. It is only a particular phase of memory just as are automatic conscious memories.
[54]. I use this term physical in the sense in which it is used in the physical sciences without reference to any metaphysical concept or the ultimate nature of matter or of a physical process.
[55]. The psyche would have to be one which would be capable of becoming differentiated at one and the same moment into two independent consciousnesses—the personal and the secondary; a soul split into two, so to speak. The desire to explain a secondary consciousness by this doctrine has probably given rise to the popular notion of two souls in a single body!
[56]. If the theory of the unconscious presented in these lectures be firmly established this doctrine will have to be modified to this extent, that, while all mental processes are accompanied by brain processes, brain processes that ordinarily have conscious equivalents can within certain limits occur without them and exhibit all the characteristics of intelligence—unconscious cerebration. Indeed, it becomes probable that every mental process is a part of a larger mechanism in which unconscious brain processes not correlated with the specifically conscious processes are integral factors.
[57]. Dr. S. J. Meltzer has pointed out in a very suggestive article (Journal American Medical Association, Vol. IV, No. 12) that the anaphylactic attack resembles that of bronchial asthma in man, and argues that this latter disease may be the same phenomenon.
[58]. T. Brailsford Robertson: Sur la Dynamique chimique du système nerveux central, Archiv. de Physiol. v. 6, 1908, p. 388. Ueber die Wirkung von Säuren auf das Athmungs Zentrum, Arch. f. die Gesammte Physiologie, Bd. 145, Hft. 5 u. 6, 1912.
[59]. Stéphane Leduc: The Mechanism of Life.
[60]. Further studies in the chemical dynamics of the central nervous system, Folio Neuro-Biologica, Bd. VI, Nos. 7 and 8, 1912.
[61]. Eugenio Rignano: Upon the Inheritance of Acquired Characters. Trans. by Basil C. H. Harvey, Chicago. Open Court Publishing Co., 1911.
[62]. Prince: The Nature of Mind and Human Automatism, 1885: Hughlings-Jackson on the Connection between the Mind and Brain, Brain, p. 250, 1891; The Identification of Mind and Matter, Philosoph. Rev., July, 1904.
[63]. Richard Semon (Die Mneme, 1908) has adopted the term Engramm with much the same signification that I have given to Neurogram, excepting that Engramm has a much wider meaning and connotation. It is not limited to nervous tissue, but includes the residual changes held by some to be left in all irritable living substances after stimulation. All such substances are therefore capable of memory in a wide sense (Mneme).
[64]. Th. Ribot: Diseases of Memory, pp. 154, 155. Translation by William Huntington Smith. D. Appleton & Co.
[65]. Cf. Lecture VIII, p. [238].
[66]. Emotion is a factor in the genesis of such phenomena, but may be disregarded for the present until we have studied the phenomena of the emotions by themselves.
[67]. The Work of the Digestive Glands (English Translation), p. 152.
[68]. Psychische Erregung der Speicheldrusen, J. P. Pawlow. Ergebnisse der Physiologie, 1904, I Abteil., p. 182.
[69]. Huxley Lecture, Br. Med. Jour., October 6, 1906.
[70]. Pawlow overlooked in these experiments the possible, if not probable, intermediary of the emotions in producing the effects. The principle, however, would not be affected thereby.
[71]. Compare “The Dissociation,” pp. 254, 261. For examples, see also “Multiple Personality,” by Boris Sidis, and “The Lowell Case of Amnesia,” by Isador Coriat, The Journal of Abnormal Psychology, Vol. II, p. 93.
LECTURE VI
SUBCONSCIOUS PROCESSES
In what I have said thus far I have had another purpose in view than that of a mere exposition of the psycho-physiological theory of memory. This other and chief purpose has been to lay the foundation for a conception of the Unconscious in its larger aspect. We have seen that thoughts and other conscious experiences that have passed out of mind may be and to an enormous extent are conserved and, from this point of view, may be properly regarded as simply dormant. Further we have seen that all the data collected by experimental pathology and other observations lead to the conclusion that conservation is effected in the form of neurographic residua or brain neurograms—organized physiological records of passing mental experiences of all sorts and kinds. We have seen that these neurographic records conserve not only our educational acquisitions and general stock of knowledge—all those experiences which we remember—but a vast number of others which we cannot spontaneously recall, including, it may be, many which date back to early childhood, and many which we have deliberately repressed, put out of mind and intentionally forgotten. We have also seen that it is not only these mental experiences which occupied the focus of our attention that leave their counterpart in neurograms, but those as well of which we are only partially aware—absent-minded thoughts and acts and sensations and perceptions which never entered our awareness at all—subconscious or coconscious ideas as they are called. Finally, we have seen that the mental experiences of every state, normal, artificial, or pathological, whatever may be the state of the personal consciousness, are subject to the same principle of conservation. In this way, in the course of any one’s natural life, an enormous field of neurograms is formed representing ideas which far transcend in multitude and variety those of the personal consciousness at any given moment and all moments, and which are far beyond the voluntary beck and call of the personal consciousness of the individual.
Neurograms are concepts and, by the meaning of the concept, they are unconscious. It is not necessary to enter into the question whether they are in their ultimate nature psychical or physical. That is a philosophical question.[[72]] They are at any rate unconscious in this sense; they are devoid of consciousness, i.e., have none of the psychological attributes of any of the elements of consciousness, and in the sense in which any physiological arrangement or process is not conscious, i.e., is unconscious. We have here, then, in the concept of brain residual neurograms the fundamental meaning of the Unconscious.[[73]] The unconscious is the great storehouse of neurograms which are the physiological records of our mental lives. By the terms of the concept neurograms are primarily passive—the potential form, as it were, in which psychical energy is stored. This is not to say, however, that, from moment to moment, certain ones out of the great mass may not become active processes. On the contrary, according to the theory of memory, when certain complexes of neurograms are stimulated they take on activity and function—the potential energy becomes converted into dynamic energy. In correlation with the functioning of such neurographic complexes, the complexes of ideas which they conserve—the psychological equivalents—are reproduced (according to the doctrines of monism and parallelism) and enter the stream of the personal consciousness. The unconscious becomes the conscious (monism), or provided with correlated conscious accompaniments (parallelism), and we may speak of the ideas arising out of the unconscious.[unconscious.]
Neurograms may also function as subconscious processes exhibiting intelligence and determining mental and bodily behavior.—Here two important questions present themselves. Is it a necessary consequence that when unconscious neurograms become active processes psychological equivalents must be awakened; and when they are awakened, must they necessarily enter the stream of the personal consciousness? If both these questions may be answered in the negative, then plainly in either case such active processes become by definition subconscious processes—of an unconscious nature in the one case and of a coconscious nature in the other. They would be subconscious because in the first place they would occur outside of consciousness and there is no awareness of them, and in the second place they would be a dissociated second train of processes distinct from those engaged in the conscious stream of the moment. Theoretically such subconscious processes, whether unconscious or coconscious, might perform a variety of functions according to the specificity of their activities.
Now, in preceding lectures, when marshalling the evidence for conservation, we met with a large number and variety of phenomena (automatic writing, hallucinations, post-hypnotic phenomena, dreams, “unconscious” solution of problems, etc.), which clearly demonstrated that memory might be manifested by processes of which the individual was unaware and which were outside the content of consciousness. Hence these phenomena presented very clear evidence of the occurrence of processes that may be properly termed subconscious.[[74]] Attention, however, was primarily directed to them only so far as they offered evidence of conservation and of the mode by which conservation was effected. But necessarily these evidences were subconscious manifestations of forgotten experiences (memory), and in so far as this was the case we saw that unconscious neurograms can take on activity and function subconsciously; i.e., without their psychological equivalents (i.e., correlated conscious memory) entering the stream of the personal consciousness. We may now speak of these processes as subconscious memory. But when their manifestations are carefully scrutinized they will be found to exhibit more than memory. They may, for instance, exhibit logical elaboration of the original experiences, and what corresponds to fabrication, reasoning, volition and affectivity. Theoretically this is what we should expect if any of the conserved residual experiences of life can function subconsciously. As life’s experiences include fears, doubts, scruples, wishes, affections, resentments, and numerous other affective states, innate dispositions, and instincts, the subconscious memory process necessarily may include any of these affective complexes of ideas and tendencies. An affective complex means an idea (or ideas) linked to one or more emotions and feelings. In other words, any acquired residua drawn from the general storehouse of life’s experiences may be systematized with feelings and emotions, the innate dispositions and instincts of the organism. Now it is a general psychological law that such affective states tend by the force of their conative impulses to carry the specific ideas with which they are systematized to fulfilment through mental and bodily behavior. Consequently, theoretically, it might thus well be that the residua of diverse experiences, say a fear or a wish, by the force of such impulses might become activated into very specific subconscious processes with very specific tendencies expressing themselves in very specific ways, producing very specific and diverse phenomena. Thus memory would be but one of the manifestations of subconscious processes.
Now, as a matter of fact, there are a large number of phenomena which not only justify the postulation of subconscious processes but also the inference that such processes, activated by their affective impulses, may so influence conscious thought that the latter is modified in various ways; that it may be determined in this or that direction, inhibited, interrupted, distorted, made insistent, and given pathological traits. There is also a large variety of bodily phenomena which can be explicitly shown to be due to subconscious processes, and many which are only explicable by such a mechanism. Indeed, a subconscious process may become very complex and constellated with any one or many of the psycho-physiological mechanisms of the organism. In special artificial and pathological conditions where such processes reach their highest development, as manifested through their phenomena, they may exhibit that which when consciously performed is understood to be intelligence, comprising reasoning, constructive imagination, volition, and feeling; in short, what is commonly called thought or mental processes. Memory, of course, enters as an intrinsic element in these manifestations just as it is an intrinsic element in all thought. The automatic script that describes the memories of a long-forgotten childhood experience may at the same time reason, indulge in jests, rhyme, express cognition and understanding of questions—indeed (if put to the test), might not only pass a Binet-Simon examination for intelligence, but take a high rank in a Civil Service examination. In these more elaborate exhibitions of subconscious intelligence it is obvious that there is an exuberant efflorescence of the residua deposited in many unconscious fields by life’s experiences and synthesized into a subconscious functioning system.
It is beyond the scope of this lecture to examine into the particular mechanism by which a subconscious process is provoked at all—why, for instance, a dormant wish or fear-neurogram becomes activated into a subconscious wish or fear, or having become activated, the mechanism by which such a wish or fear manifests itself in this phenomenon or that—or to examine even any large number of the various phenomena which are provoked by subconscious processes, and it is not my intention to do so. Such problems belong to special psychology and special pathology. Of recent years, for instance, certain schools of psychology, and in particular the Freudian school, have attempted to establish particular mechanisms by which subconscious processes come into being and express themselves. We are engaged in the preliminary and fundamental task of establishing, if possible, certain basic principles which any mechanism must make use of, and, as a deeper-lying theoretical question, the nature of such processes.
The subconscious now belongs to popular speech and it is the fashion of the day to speak of it glibly enough, but I fear it means very little to the average person. It is involved in vagueness if not mystery. Yet as a necessary induction from observed facts it has a very precise and concrete meaning devoid of abstruseness[abstruseness], just as the other has a precise and concrete meaning. Although subconscious processes were originally postulated on theoretical grounds, the theory is fortunately open to experimental tests so that it is capable of being placed on an experimental basis like other concepts of science. It is possible to artificially create such processes and study their phenomena; that is to say, the modes in which they manifest their activities, their influence upon conscious and bodily processes. We can study their effect in inhibiting and distorting thought, in determining it in this or that direction, in creating hallucinatory, emotional, amnesic, and other mental phenomena, in inducing physiological disturbances of motion, sensation, of the viscera, etc. We can also study the capabilities and limitations of the subconscious in carrying on intelligent operations below the threshold of consciousness. Again, we can investigate the phenomena of this kind as met with in the course of clinical observations, and by technical methods of research explore the subconscious and thus explicitly reveal the process underlying and inducing the phenomena. By such methods of investigation the subconscious has been removed from the field of speculative psychology, and placed in the field of experimental research. We have thus been enabled to postulate a subconscious process as a definite concrete process producing very definite phenomena. These processes and their phenomena have become a field of study in themselves and, from my point of view, the determination of the laws of the subconscious should be approached by such experimental and technical methods of research. After its various modes of activity, its capabilities and limitations have been in this way established, its laws can then be applied to the solution of conditions surrounding particular problems. Though we can determine the actuality of a particular subconscious process this does not mean that we can determine all the components of that process; we may be able to determine many or perhaps none of these: just as among the constituents of a crowd we may discern an active, turbulent group creating a disturbance, though we may not be able to recognize all the components of the group or the scattered individuals acting in conjunction with it. Nor may we be able to determine the intrinsic nature of a subconscious process—whether it is a conscious or unconscious one, but only the actuality of the process, the conditions of its activity, and the phenomena which it induces.
A subconscious process may be provisionally defined as one of which the personality is unaware, which, therefore, is outside the personal consciousness, and which is a factor in the determination of conscious and bodily phenomena, or produces effects analogous to those which might be directly or indirectly induced by consciousness. It would be out of the question at this time to enter into an exposition of the larger subject—the multiform phenomena of the subconscious, but as its processes are fundamental to an understanding of many phenomena with which we shall have to deal, we should have a clear understanding of the grounds on which such processes are postulated as specific, concrete occurrences. The classical demonstration of subconscious occurrences makes use of certain phenomena of hysteria, particularly those of subconscious personalities and artificial “automatic” phenomena like automatic writing. The epoch-making researches of Janet[[75]] on hysterics and almost coincidently with him of Edmund Gurney on hypnotics very clearly established the fact that these phenomena are the manifestations of dissociated processes outside of and independent of the personal consciousness. Among the phenomena, for example, are motor activities of various kinds such as ordinarily are or may be induced by conscious intelligence. As the individual, owing to anesthesia, may be entirely unaware even that he has performed any such act, the process that performed it must be one that is subconscious.
The intrinsic nature of subconscious processes.—Janet further brought forward indisputable evidence showing that in hysteria these subconscious processes are real coconscious processes. It is only another mode of expressing this to say that there is a dissociation or division of consciousness in consequence of which certain ideas do not enter the content of the personal consciousness of the individual. It is possible, as he was the first to show, to communicate with and, in hypnotic and other dissociated states, recover memories of these split-off ideas of which the individual is unaware, and thereby establish the principle that these ideas are the subconscious process which induces the hysterical phenomena. (These phenomena are of a great many kinds and include sensory as well as motor automatisms, inhibition of thought and will, deliria, visceral, emotional, and other disturbances of mind and body.) The hysterical subconscious process is thus determined to be a very specific concrete coconscious process, one, the elements of which are memories and other particular ideas. This type of subconscious process, therefore, may be regarded as the activated residua of antecedent experiences with or without secondary elaboration. All subsequent investigations during the past twenty-five years have served but to confirm the accuracy of Janet’s observations and conclusions. It would be out of the question at this time, before coconscious ideas have been systematically studied, to attempt to present the evidence on which this interpretation of certain subconscious phenomena rests. This will be done in other lectures.[[76]] I will simply say that this evidence for coconsciousness occurring in certain special conditions, artificial and pathological, and perhaps as a constituent of the normal content of consciousness, is of precisely the same character as that for the occurrence of consciousness in any other individual but one’s self. If we reject the evidence of hysterical phenomena, of that furnished by a coconscious personality, and by automatic script and speech, etc., we shall have to reject precisely similar evidence for consciousness in other people than ourselves.[[77]] The evidence is explicit and not implied.
A subconscious personality is a condition where complexes of subconscious processes have been constellated into a personal system, manifesting a secondary system of self-consciousness endowed with volition, intelligence, etc. Such a subconscious personality is capable of communicating with the experimenter and describing its own mental processes. It can, after repression of the primary personality, become the sole personality for the time being, and then remember its previous subconscious life, as we all remember our past conscious life, and can give full and explicit information regarding the nature of the subconscious process. By making use of the testimony of a subconscious personality and its various manifestations, we can not only establish the actuality of subconscious processes and their intrinsic nature in these conditions, but by prearrangement with this personality predetermine any particular process we desire and study the modes in which it influences conscious thought and conduct. For instance, we can prescribe a conflict between the subconsciousness and the personal consciousness, between a subconscious wish and a conscious wish, or volition, and observe the resultant mental and physical behavior, which may be inhibition of thought, hallucinations, amnesia, motor phenomena, etc. The possibilities and limitations of subconscious influences can in this way be experimentally studied. Subconscious personalities, therefore, afford a valuable means for studying the mechanism of the mind.[[78]]
The conclusion, then, seems compulsory that the subconscious processes in many conditions, particularly those that are artificially induced and those that are pathological, are coconscious processes.
There are other phenomena, however, which require the postulation of a subconscious process, yet which, when the subconscious is searched by the same methods made use of in hysterical phenomena, do not reveal explicit evidence of coconsciousness. An analysis of the subconscious revelations as well as the phenomena themselves seems to favor the interpretation that in some cases the underlying process is in part and in others wholly unconscious. The only ground for the interpretation that all subconscious processes are wholly conscious is the assumption that, as some are conscious, all must be. This is as unsound as the assumption that, because at the other end of the scale some complex actions (e. g., those performed by decerebrated animals) are intelligent and yet performed by processes necessarily unconscious, therefore all actions not under the guidance of the personal consciousness are performed by unconscious processes.
If some subconscious processes are unconscious they are equivalent to physiological processes such as, ex hypothesi, are correlated with all conscious processes and perhaps may be identified with them. In truth, they mean nothing more nor less than “unconscious cerebration.”
We can say at once that considering the complexity and multiformity of psycho-physiological phenomena there would seem to be no a priori reason why all subconscious phenomena must be the same in respect to being either coconscious or unconscious; some may be the one and some the other. It is plainly a matter of interpretation of the facts and there still exists some difference of opinion. The problem is a very difficult one to settle by methods at present available; yet it can only be settled by the same methods, in principle, that we depend upon to determine the reality of a personal consciousness in other persons than ourselves. No amount of a priori argument will suffice. Perhaps some day a criterion of a conscious state of which the individual is unaware will be found, just as the psycho-galvanic phenomenon is possibly a criterion of an effective state. Any conclusions which we reach at present should be regarded as provisional.[[79]]